Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Characterization Of The Long-Distance Dispersal Kernel Of White-Tailed Deer And Evaluating Its Impact On Chronic Wasting Disease Spread In Wisconsin, Mennatallah Gouda

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) is a fatal, untreatable neurodegenerative disease that infects deer and related species. It is highly contagious and caused by abnormal malfunction and assembly of normal cellular proteins into aggregation-prone proteins. The Centers for Disease Control and prevention report that the prevalence of CWD in free-ranging deer in the US is still relatively low. However, in several states the infection rates exceed 1 deer in 10. Deer may uptake CWD from direct interaction with infected individuals or from the environment. Infected individuals shed CWD into the environment through feces, urine, saliva or carcasses, and long-distance dispersal of …

Using Gamification To Foster Student Resilience And Motivation To Learn, And Using Games To Teach Significance Testing Concepts In The Statistics Classroom, Todd Partridge

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Two studies are outlined in this dissertation.

In the first study, elements of Super Mario Bros. videos games were used to change the way college students in a beginners’ statistics course were graded on their work. This was part of an effort to help students remain optimistic in the face of challenging coursework and even failure on assignments and tests. The study shows that the changes made to the grading structure did help students to keep trying and to use the materials given to them by their professor until they achieved their desired grade in the course, and suggests ways …

Stressor: An R Package For Benchmarking Machine Learning Models, Samuel A. Haycock

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Many discipline specific researchers need a way to quickly compare the accuracy of their predictive models to other alternatives. However, many of these researchers are not experienced with multiple programming languages. Python has recently been the leader in machine learning functionality, which includes the PyCaret library that allows users to develop high-performing machine learning models with only a few lines of code. The goal of the stressor package is to help users of the R programming language access the advantages of PyCaret without having to learn Python. This allows the user to leverage R’s powerful data analysis workflows, while simultaneously …

An Interval-Valued Random Forests, Paul Gaona Partida

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

There is a growing demand for the development of new statistical models and the refinement of established methods to accommodate different data structures. This need arises from the recognition that traditional statistics often assume the value of each observation to be precise, which may not hold true in many real-world scenarios. Factors such as the collection process and technological advancements can introduce imprecision and uncertainty into the data.

For example, consider data collected over a long period of time, where newer measurement tools may offer greater accuracy and provide more information than previous methods. In such cases, it becomes crucial …

A Frobenius-Schur Extension For Real Projective Representation, Levi Gagnon‐Ririe

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Many problems in physics have explicit mathematical descriptions. This thesis aims to provide the mathematical tools for a particular problem in physics, that of Quantum Mechanical symmetries. In essence, we extend the known mathematics to a more general setting and provide a wider view of Real projective representation theory. The work done in this thesis contributes to the subfield of mathematics known as representation theory and to the subfield of physics concerned with time reversal symmetry.

Investigating The Effect Of Greediness On The Coordinate Exchange Algorithm For Generating Optimal Experimental Designs, William Thomas Gullion

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Design of Experiments (DoE) is the field of statistics concerned with helping researchers maximize the amount of information they gain from their experiments. Recently, researchers have been turning to optimal experimental designs instead of classical/catalog experimental designs. One of the most popular algorithms used today to generate optimal designs is the Coordinate Exchange (CEXCH) Algorithm. CEXCH is known to be a greedy algorithm, which means it tends to favor immediate, locally best designs instead of globally optimal designs. Previous research demonstrated that this tradeoff was efficacious in that it reduced the cost of a single run of CEXCH and allowed …

Examining Model Complexity's Effects When Predicting Continuous Measures From Ordinal Labels, Mckade S. Thomas

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Many real world problems require the prediction of ordinal variables where the values are a set of categories with an ordering to them. However, in many of these cases the categorical nature of the ordinal data is not a desirable outcome. As such, regression models treat ordinal variables as continuous and do not bind their predictions to discrete categories. Prior research has found that these models are capable of learning useful information between the discrete levels of the ordinal labels they are trained on, but complex models may learn ordinal labels too closely, missing the information between levels. In this …